Interview with Edward Ladd
June 13, 2000
Interviewed by: Tom Goettell
Tom: O.K. It’s June 13th, 2000, right?
Ed: Yep.
Tom: And it’s ah…we’re sitting here in Amherst, Massachusetts. My name is Tom
Goettell and we’re talking to Ed Ladd who retired about a dozen years ago from
Wildlife Assistance, the Wildlife Assistance branch of the Fish and Wildlife
Service, which at that time was actually with the U.S.D.A., but I’m sure he’ll tell
us about that. Ed, how’d you get into Wildlife?
Ed: Well, I went to the University of Maine and graduated with a degree in Wildlife
Conservation oh, 1958 I guess. Took the standard government entrance exams.
Had interviews for the Fish and Wildlife lab in Illinois, If I remember correctly,
Army Corps of Engineers lab down in Louisiana and found this job with the Fish
and Wildlife Service strictly by accident…(unintelligible)…and interviewed for
that job, and of course the initial opening was here in Amherst, which is a lot
closer to my home in Maine than Louisiana. And since I had a pregnant wife
at the time it was a lot quicker to get down here and take this job than it would
to move to Louisiana, and really I am glad that I did from what I understand. The
Service, over the thirty years that I spent with it, was a lot easier organization to
work with than the Army Corps of Engineers and the Forest Service. But, that’s
basic…I started right here in Amherst under the old Predator and Road, P. and
R.C., Predator and Rodent Control Division.
Tom: And you were in charge of Western Massachusetts in the Rodent Control Fund.
You’re from Maine originally?
Ed: Yes, yes.
Tom: From right around Orono, at Orono…Brewer was it?
Ed: Brewer.
Tom: Brewer, yeah.
Ed: Bangor-Brewer complex. It’s about eight miles down the river from Orono,
where the University is.
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Tom: Uh-huh.
Ed: It was real quick and real convenient.
Tom: So you spent, you started out here in Amherst and then where did they take ya?
Ed: Well, let’s see, 19, it was 1961; they wanted an office in Maine so they assigned
me to an office at the University of Maine, and I started the office up there and
stayed there until 19, 1966 I believe. Went up there for the first time, couldn’t
even find a key to the door. Opened it up; the office furniture consisted of a
piece of plywood on two saw horses, and three boxes of old files they’d
scrounged up from somewhere and that was it, and the car that I’d brought from
Amherst with odds and ends of equipment in it. That sufficed for probably about
six months until we could get a desk, and a filing cabinet, and a chair and some of
this other stuff.
Tom: So what types of projects did you work on up there?
Ed: Well, initially I was sent up there to work in cooperation with the U.S. Forest
Service Research Station in Bradley, and the University. Arthur Hart was in
charge of the station. There was a research forester, a teacher from U. Mass and
myself, and they were interested in studying the effects of mice and birds on
reforestation: how much seed do they eat, this type of thing. We set up about a
five acre plot, I guess it was in the Penobscott Research Forest, and I did the bird
and mammal measurements and they did the seed measurements and this type of
thing. And that went on for…well, I guess they wrote the report after I
transferred out in ’66. A lot of the time was working with the Forest Service --
Maine Forest Service and U.S. Forest Service. I did some more mammal and bird
study work down at the [Massubeesiks] down in [Elkroods], reforestation seed
protection with the Maine Forest Service -- basically out watching the county I
guess and this type of thing. Now this [was] in addition to meeting and trying to
set up contacts with the Extension Service and all the typical people you would
work with in Wildlife Assistance. One of the other projects, and this was about
19, I’ll say ’63 and ’64, that’s when the first rabid fox showed up in Maine.
[Cart] Palmer actually spearheaded the operation even though the state, you
know, the project was in my district, and they brought in people from
Pennsylvania and several other Wildlife Assistance districts and they poisoned
basically foxes, raccoons, any of the of the predators which would contract rabies
and spread it around over the northwestern part of the state. We spent about a
month doing that.
Tom: Wow. Boy, that’s a huge area.
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Ed: It sure is. It sure is.
Tom: And did it have, did it work? Did it have any effect?
Ed: I think the basic premise was that if you could cut the population down, then the
chances of one rabid animal meeting another rabid animal would lessen to a
degree, but no it didn’t. A couple of us went back in, I guess it was the fall and
did another small area where a rabid fox had gotten into a barn or something like
this and chased a horse or something or other, and re-treated another area, but
rabies is probably scattered throughout the state right now. It has been for a
number of years.
Tom: And what did you use for bait?
Ed: Strychnine.
Tom: Strychnine. In eggs?
Ed: No, it was a [tallow] bait. We put together a little hole and plug method where we
could make little [tallow] drop baits, about the size of a nickel, and we’d put some
[tallow] in it, put the pill in it, put some more [tallow] in it and squeeze it and
push it out the other side. We’d end up with a sack full of bait for everybody, and
they could go out and spread ‘em at the prescribed level and a prescribed distance
and this type of thing. Hit or miss type of thing. You’d go down roadways and
drop one or two here, and here, and here and down the road. Presumably a fox or
raccoon would hit ‘em, and we did get a lot of foxes and raccoons, but it never
had the desired effect. The state took the program on after we got out of it, did
the same thing for another couple of years. But, most of it was typical Northeast
type rodent patrol, animal control work where if somebody would have a
problem we would investigate the problem, try to figure out why it happened and
what could be done to alleviate it, and give them the information and perhaps the
tools to do the job and get ‘em headed in the right direction and head off for the
next project somewhere.
Tom: So, would it be like farmyards, just guys with people’s barns or…
Ed: It could be farmyards, bats in the belfry, bats in the attic, you know, typical small
animal type work. A couple of times I’ve been involved, at least initially, with…
(unintelligible)…the power mill, the paper mill down in Bucksport. They had a
large, presumably a large porcupine problem in a couple areas. We checked that
out, but basically it wasn’t worth the effort to do anything about it. It would be
something of this nature. And then like I say, in 1966 the position, John
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Peterson’s position in Amherst opened up, and it was a promotion and so I took
that job, moved back down here. Spent the next thirty-some odd years down here,
well, twenty-some odd years down here.
Tom: Now, did you get involved in any of the cormorant work in Maine or
Massachusetts?
Ed: No, that came two or three supervisors after me. (Unintelligible)…took the
position after I left, and of course they moved the office from the University of
Maine down to Augusta. He got involved with pigeon work, things of that nature.
I’m not sure if Frank was involved in cormorants or not. He did some of the
initial work with 13-39 on crows and the Bangor dump I think, and I think he
did…yeah he was there. There was the initial 13-39 work done on gulls and the
town where President Bush had his summer home, and I’ve forgotten the name.
Tom: Kennabunkport?
Ed: Kennabunkport. I know we treated ‘em at the dump and then we scoured the bay
down there looking for the results without too much luck. And of course, a lot of
the follow up of the secondary work on 13-39 on gulls was done here in
Massachusetts. We got some of the toxic results from Denver on what it would
and would not effect. (Unintelligible)…unit up at U. Mass. did some more of the
work; we threw our two cents worth in, and basing and putting together how big
a dosage it would need and what kind of a carrier you would use it on. This was
where the [O-E-O] and 1339 and bread came out and cut up in little squares and
put it in their nests and things of this nature. And that all stimulated because of
our …(unintelligible)…from the Mass. Audubon Society and Bill Drewry. They
had tried to kill gulls on some of their breeding islands with [alphachlorilals] and
two or three other materials, and it didn’t work. As I understand it, they came to
the regional director for help and that’s when we got involved with 13-39 for
gulls; a director request from Mass. Audubon.
Tom: And that was….Some of their colonies were down in Chatham, I think, [Turn
Island] was there…
Ed: Yeah, [Turn Island], [Ruckchatham], couple up further up in the bay,
[Nomanswoe]; there was another one down there. I’ve forgotten the name of that
one. Bird Island further on down the coast. All together there was probably
eight or nine islands, a bunch of ‘em, and I know that, and they were done for
several consecutive years in a row, particularly that one at Bird Island. It was the
one that had the [Turns] on it and the lighthouse. That was done every year for
about three or four years. Helping [Ian Nesbit] do that job.
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Tom: And that was, it worked, right? I mean it was very successful.
Ed: Oh, it went very, very well, I mean, we could basically through timing and a
couple of repeat operations pretty much take care of a gull population for that
season on any one given colony. You know, you go in through one, one
operation you would get a large percentage of ‘em and then you have, many
times go through with a second treatment for re-nesters and things like that
because which ever gull came back to the nest first had a tendency to eat the
three baits, and that meant the other one was still hanging around lose so you
had to come back through and retrieve ‘em. And let’s see, I guess we did
[Monahoy] once. I helped the refuge people do [Monahoy] once or twice; I’ve
forgotten how many times I was out there. That kept us busy for several years.
Another one was when they were doing the basic survey work in Boston
Harbor. We did the rodent work and some of the bird and mammal survey work
on all of those, and there was twenty-one different islands out there in Boston
Harbor, and that kept us busy pretty much one whole summer doing that and
writing the report, sending out to the powers that be.
Tom: Why did they do that?
Ed: At that time they were doing the preliminary work turning the Boston Harbor
Islands into a state park or national park or a combination of both, and I guess
they actually succeeded. It is a state park. Just about all of those islands out
there are state parks right now. It’s surprising though, the wildlife that is out
there, the species of birds. The historical part of this thing is fantastic. I
mean there’s a gun emplacement on practically every island out there. One of
the islands had an immigrant reception station very similar to the one in
Rikers Island, old hospitals. I think, yeah, there’s a big military hospital on one.
There are forts all over the place out there. Everything goes back to about the
Civil War down to World War I and II. I enjoyed that one, I enjoyed that one
immensely.
Tom: Is there a lot of birds nesting out there?
Ed: Yes. Course you have your couple three species of gulls, black crown night
herons, and all of your various song birds and things like that. Spectacle
Island, which is the old dumping ground right off the end of Logan, had a
black crown night heron colony and a whole bunch of gulls. In fact, that one
there became a bird hazard for Logan it self and we tried an experiment of
putting two foxes out there during the nesting season to keep the gulls stirred
up, but I guess they were a little bit too tame. They would come right down to
the beach and meet the boat so to speak, which helped with an early demise for
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those two. Logan is an interesting place and I first started on in 1958, right
after that [electric] crash killing a hundred or so people. I spent a lot of time at
Logan Airport just plain moving birds so that this would not happen again.
Somebody was doing the investigations on that thing, and we used to take
candidates down there marking gulls to see where they were coming and where
they were coming from, did a basic habitat survey to see what was attracting
birds and what birds were being attracted. That’s where the initial work was
done to outline the ponds, the grass cover, the dump that they had at Logan at that
time, which attracted a lot of blackbirds and this type of thing. Had a series of
these carbide cannons out there to move birds, shot gun patrols, cracker shells,
every conceivable device you could think of was out there just to move birds off
that airport.
Tom: And did that work?
Ed: As long as you kept after ‘em, but they had to do a lot of vegitative habitat
control. Basically they were told they had to fill in those ponds, get rid of the
dump, start mowing the grass, cut back on the trash and available food and this
type of thing because they were running, at least in my mind, a bird sanctuary at
an airport simultaneously on the same piece of ground, but that’s not unusual
because at that time probably half the airports at that time were doing the same
thing. It was one of those things that you just didn’t realize.
Tom: Yeah. That was one of the things that got you guys started on gull control too,
wasn’t it, with that [electric]…
Ed: That [electric] thing, right. I don’t think anybody really paid that much attention
to what the gulls where doing at that time. You had gulls actually nesting on parts
of the airport, you had people digging clams on the clam flats at low tide which
attracted gulls. Like I said, you had all these islands out there in the actual flight
path which were serving as nesting islands, Spectacle Island and a whole bunch of
others. It was just a natural. Boston Harbor is a natural for raising birds.
Tom: Yeah. I heard a story one time that when Eisenhower was President, I think it was
1960 when he was still President, his Air Force I sucked in a gull and one of the
engines cut, and that lead to some money for gull funding too….
Ed: (Unintelligible)…that would have taken place in the regional office at that time or
somewhere up the line. If it floated down, you know, I knew nothing about that
one. I know Eisenhower was instrumental in getting Canada geese moved in
Connecticut. So, law enforcement told me that whenever this thing started, one of
the, White Plains I think it was, one of the golf courses; he was scheduled to play
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golf down there and there where geese crapping all over the place. The word was
put out that it would be nice if those geese were not there when President
Eisenhower came through to play, so consequently the geese weren’t there when
Eisenhower came through to play. They were just politely moved somewhere
else, and that started a whole ‘nother fiasco.
Tom: Which was the trapping of…
Ed: The trapping and the movement of gulls for what, ten years or something like
that?
Tom: Geese. ‘Cause I remember when I was in Maine I remember you coming up to
[Cutler]. I remember you bringing truck loads of Canada geese up to [Cutler] and
dumping them out. They were banding ‘em, dump ‘em off at the naval base
there.
Ed: Put ‘em off at the naval radio station there in [Cutler] for about two or three
years, and then Pat called from the Maine Fish and Wildlife. He used to come
down and he’d haul a truckload back every year for several years in a row. More
birds, at least from the work that, the gathering after we did in Connecticut were
shipped to West Virginia. We never did round up geese in Massachusetts. All of
the geese problems in Rhode Island where taken care of by Charlie Allen and
Rhode Island Fish and Wildlife. We did basically the round up of birds in
Connecticut, which is where it started. We just didn’t expand it beyond that state.
Several other states got involved, but they were in different districts. A lot of
geese were moved. We’d move anywhere from three, four five hundred birds a
year out of the state of Connecticut alone. Then you would go back to the same
site year after year after year and take the same number of birds off. All different
birds, and none of them were, very few were banded because all of the birds
captured and removed and transported and removed where all banded, so it was
entirely a new crop of birds. A classic example I guess where nature abhors a
vacuum. I mean, you create a vacuum and she’ll fill that thing right in, and they
did it year after year after year, and their still there.
Tom: Were you ever down in Muskeget? Were you ever involved down there in any
of the bird work?
Ed: Let’s see, Muskeget. That’s the one off Nantucket, right?
Tom: Nantucket, yeah.
Ed: [Rainey Bolinger]. I spent two weeks out there once, about ’60, ’64 or ’65 I
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guess. Dave [Wetherby] was working on a chemical called [“Sudan Black”],
which is fed to gulls; turned the yolk carbon black, turned it black so they would
not develop. So [Rainey] and I were put out there for two weeks basically to
survey that place and create a grid system where they could put out some kind of
a geometric system of distributing [Sudan Black] treated herring in the…
(unintelligible). That is all that I had to do with it initially. I was stationed in
Maine at the time. [Rainey] was in, I guess he was in [Weston]. Anyway, we
went out there. Pete and somebody were out there, and we replaced them. So,
we tried to survey the thing. We created basically a baseline down through the
middle of the islands and did some of the topography work showing where the
ponds and the hills, and this type of thing, where the old runway system was and
the buildings. Drank a lot of stagnant, salty water because the well system wasn’t
too hot.
Tom: So there was a runway on Muskeget too?
Ed: Yeah. There were two cabins on there. One was a fish wardens camp on one end
and the other one belonged to a guy by the name of Snow who was somehow or
another connected with the Massachusetts Civil Air Patrol or something like that.
He was a flier and he had a runway. In fact, this was one of the reasons this place
was used as an experimental plot. He had a hard time flying in and out of that
place because the gulls on this grass runway he had there. I went back there
several years later when we were doing this coastal seabird thing and the gull
population on Muskeget had really, really gone down tremendously. It dropped
way down, but then it had dropped in several other places too.
Tom: And was that mostly herring gulls or herring…
Ed: mostly Heron, gulls and a few Black Backs, which is pretty much all that were
located on the coast then. I’m not sure whether there were other species or not.
Tom: Yeah, see great black backs have gone way up now.
Ed: Have they?
Tom: Yeah. Herring gulls have probably gone down a little bit. And I know you were
involved in No Man’s Land quite a bit.
Ed: My private little refuge. (they chuckle). I’m not sure, well yeah I do too. Charlie
Malloy was made the area manager and Charlie Malloy was a stickler for the way
things should be, and I think No Man’s Land was basically under the, was being
surveyed or worked by the regional office. And since it wasn’t military land and
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since part of the job of Wildlife Assistance was to provide wildlife services to
military reservations and things like that, he basically took No Man’s Land
away from the regional office and plumped it down in my desk. I used to
make two, three, four trips a year out there basically just to see what was going
on, survey nesting birds. Used to make over flights with Ralph Anders for
turn colonies, turn numbers, gulls numbers and this type of thing; survey as
much as one person could do it, and whenever ducks where nesting out there, and
the geese and this type of thing; keep an eye on the turn colonies. There were no
biting flies out there so that was nice, and there were no mammals out there with
the exception of a few muskrats, which that population never seemed to develop
a lot, a few turtles. We got a habitat map done on that place. Working with the
people from the U.S. Navy we got basically a line drawn down through the
middle of it because this was a bombing and target range for the U.S. Navy/
Marine Corps, and anybody else that were flying around, so that they would stay
to one side of the line and just basically leave the other side alone. The place,
when I first went out there, was almost impenetrable with rose bushes and you
know, just plain brush. You had to practically cut your way through that thing,
and one way or another we got that place burned so that the brush would go down
and your grasses started and basically a more diversified habitat so you get more
diversified bird cover in there. And, that’s pretty much the way it was left when
I was transferred, well, when the section was transferred from the Fish and
Wildlife Service to the Department of Agriculture. You’d just make your bird
survey’s whenever possible, fight off any attempt for somebody to hit at [his]
deer or something else out there because it was basically a good bird refuge.
Why change it? And, it was contributing a few ducks, blacks and things like that
to the flyway every year.
Tom: Were there sheep out there?
Ed: They were originally. That was, it was taken from a family back in the early
forty’s, probably just about the beginning of World War II, and they had sheep
and rabbits out there. When they left, all of the other livestock went with it.
There were farm buildings and this type of thing. The Navy created a runway on
the south end of the island. They had two or three buildings out there. The
runway is kind of interesting itself. If you look at it, if you fly in and look at it, it
had just about the same length of a World War II carrier and the edge of the
runway was the edge of the island, so you took off from the runway like you,
basically, similarly like you were taking off from a carrier. This is the way I
looked at it. Nobody would confirm it one way or another, and you either made it
into the air or you swallowed a lot of the Atlantic Ocean out there, airplane and
all. And, then it was turned into, during the Vietnam War they dug pits out there
and they put in simulated sand missiles. Then later on it became, they just, some
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high speed jet target practice, but a lot of it was helicopter target practice out
there. In fact, a Marine Reserve unit would fly me out, and leave me and come
pick me up either the same day or the next day or something like that. It was
kind of interesting. Six hundred and twenty acres of mine (he chuckles). First
time you go out there they send a medic with you, they send a demolition
expert with you. Basically they would send about five people with you,
including a warrant officer or an NCO, Navy NCO of some kind just to make
sure you behaved yourself, but after about the second or third trip, I mean this
became an expense and you, you know, they could see you’re not gonna start
gathering up spent ammunition and used bombs and that kind of stuff, and you
kind of stayed away, so they’d just trust you. They’d just fly you out there, they’d
drop you off and they’d come back in the afternoon, pick you up and haul you out
of there. It was simple as that. You had the place to yourself for a number of
hours, and it’s small enough so that you could do a fairly decent survey job – a
quick overlook anyway within a one days time period.
Tom: Do you remember how many turns you had out there at the time?
Ed: No, there was…(Unintelligible)…,a few…(Unintelligible)…and every once in a
while you’d pick up a pair or two of [Rosiettes], and they were on the, oh see,
it would be the little sand flats up in the north, north-northeast end toward
Martha’s Vineyard. I can’t give you numbers. The gull population used to stay
relatively stable, maybe twenty, twenty-five thousand birds out there. Every year
there would probably be oh, somewhere between ten and fifteen nesting pair of
Canada geese, occasionally a Mute Swan would show up, but they never lasted; a
few Green Snakes, you know, Garter Snakes, this type of thing; no mice.
Tom: What kind of turtles? Do you remember?
Ed: No I don’t.
Tom: You say the Mute Swans wouldn’t last.
Ed: They just never stayed, I mean, you’d see them floating around there. I never saw
an indication that they nested. They just, I guess, flew in from Martha’s Vineyard
and hung around for a while, then flew back again. In fact, I never saw more than
one out there. (Unintelligible)…mated there; just one bird. It was on two or three
instances I think.
Tom: I don’t know if there’s any Mute Swans out there now, but they certainly are all
over the place. Their a big problem in Rhode Island, Connecticut and…
thousands of ‘em.
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Ed: With ah, I guess it was Charlie Allen, Rhode Island Fish and Wildlife, we had a
couple of projects going, one project going for two or three summers on various
ways to treat Mute Swan eggs in the nest so that they just wouldn’t develop. One
was basically pick ‘em up and shake ‘em, another one was an oil base spray.
Spray the egg and it just kind of sealed it up. That was done in several places in
Rhode Island. It was also done at the, oh that big estate on Martha’s Vineyard --
the one that Jacquelyn Kennedy bought, way before she bought it. John [Lenear]
worked for me at that time; he kind of ran that part of the operation. It worked,
but you know it’s a labor-intensive thing. First of all you gotta find all of those
Mute Swan nests, and then you have to do it in a very subtle manner because
people like swans.
See, what else? Environmental Impact Statements; did a lot of those. This is kind
of the way things worked. You got into Environmental Impact Statements and
a lot of that stuff came to Wildlife Services, and we did the initial, you know,
started this thing out initially. Pesticide surveillance; we did a lot of that work
initially. Wildlife management on military reservations; we did a lot of this stuff
initially, and then eventually it was passed onto somebody else, Ecological
Services or they would create a division to take care of pesticides or something
like this. But, we got in basically on the initial work on a lot of these various
programs when they first came down the road.
A bunch of us did a lot of the pesticide surveillance work in Maine for…
(unintelligible)…or the Forest Service…(unintelligible)…you know, thousands
and thousands of acres up there. We started out with, I think, the last DDT spray,
and several others of the various fire arms that we used for one reason or another.
We broke into initial survey work and then tried to evaluate what happened after
they sprayed this thing and see if there was any measurable effect on the various
bird species. I got sent pretty close to a month to Panama on loan to the
Department of Agriculture in the Air Force because they wanted to spray, I guess
they were gonna spray parts of Vietnam for mosquito control, but rather than
ship us to Vietnam where it was a little hot and tense at the time, we went to a
military reservation in Panama, and they sprayed it and we measured the fish
problem, you know, the possibility of fish damage and bird damage in Panama for
the Department of Agriculture in the Air Force, which was an interesting trip.
Tom: Yeah, I bet.
Ed: I needed a standard though, a standard…(unintelligible). I’ll go anywhere, any
time for no more than a month, and then I’d come back. They just never seemed
to take me up on it.
Most of the work, let’s see, I came down to Massachusetts in 1966 and retired in
January 1, 1988. These various little incidents that took place, like you know
Boston Harbor Islands and Canada Geese and Impact Statements and No Man’s
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Land and things like that, that was kind of the gravy. A lot of the time we were
working with Agriculture on their orchard mouse problems and their bird
problems and things like this. With Jim Forbes, when he first came to work for
me in 1966, he started a project of working with an experimental orchard mouse
control toxin, and then he carried it over to New York State when he finally
transferred over there. During the fall months and winter months, early winter
months, several different orchards, as we would survey these things and then we
would treat them with this experimental material to see if that would do a better
job of controlling orchard mice than the existing zinc [phosphide], but it never
did. We got to know a lot of pine and meadow mice on a first hand basis this way
though, I mean, survey several thousand acres of those darn things.
And, let’s see, O.K. We were involved in bird hazards to aircraft. Like I say, one
of the first projects I had when I came to work with the old Division of Predator
and Rodent Control was Logan Airport and that electric crash, and that kind of
died down for a while and then, I guess Al [Godden] was down in New Jersey
about the time they started having a lot of problems at Kennedy, and Al
[Godden] actually developed a system of surveying an airport for bird hazards.
And through Al (there were a bunch of us), Al [Godden], Jim [Forbes], myself
and two or three other people, for a while they were running training courses for
airport personnel, for the FAA and things like this, and training people to
recognize a bird hazard at an airport and what you could do about it to minimize
that problem, and we did that in several different airports, including FAA
headquarters, the main airport down in Virginia. My part in those things was
describe the working tools that you had to work with, and then give them an
overview of what had happened at Logan over the years and how that thing had
progressed from basically a bird refuge back into a full-time airport with a
minimum of problems.
One of the other projects, things that we did, at least I did on a continuous basis
and that was teaching students at colleges. I had a one afternoon, three-hour
course at the University of Rhode Island every year for twenty-one years…
Tom: No kidding.
Ed: …where you would show these students what the various types of traps were and
what they would do and why they were different sizes and how you would set
them and this type of thing, and what fur prices where worth at that given time
and this type of thing. And, the University of Connecticut on several occasions,
basically a class on wildlife damage control using traps and repellents and sound
and noise and how to identify damage, what causes problems and what you could
do to minimize these problems. When I was at the station up in Maine stationed
at the University of Maine for three, I guess it was three years, they held a Maine
Warden Training School at the University of Maine and I taught a session on the
Ladd 13
use of steel in live traps and things like this to the Maine Warden Service, and I
did a couple of those same sessions down here in Massachusetts for the
Environmental Police about the time that they took on several other different
entities. I guess they incorporated the Marine Police and the Inland Police, and
basically became the Environmental Police Force that they have now. That was
through Jim [Madamski] and Tom [Ricardi]. You do what educational work you
can. Two or three of these same types of courses were held [for] the students at
the University of Massachusetts, they were held at the University of Maine, the
University of Connecticut, the University of Rhode Island, the University of
New Hampshire. I think the only one that I missed, Cornell, the only one I
missed was the University of Vermont, and I’m not sure how that got missed.
Somebody goofed up I guess, I don’t know.
When the states became involved in pesticide registration I became involved
with the pesticide coordinator at the University of Massachusetts in writing the
handbook that they used for one of the, one of the sections, basically wildlife
damage control, this type of thing. The ironic thing of that – I wrote the
handbook, people studied the handbook, people took the test to get their ticket, I
wrote the test to get the ticket; I had to take my own test to get my ticket for
pesticide…(unintelligible because Tom and Ed both chuckle), and it was an open
book test, I mean, you could take the book in there, so I just took the list of
answers in, I mean hell, I wrote the test, I knew what the answers were, but I
wasn’t gonna screw it up.
Tom: Saved a lot of time.
Ed: Saved a lot of time. And, the same thing happened in the state of Connecticut,
although they were gracious enough to give me a complementary ticket down
there. But, I used to run the courses and I wrote the, passed the manual, wrote
the exams and basically gave the exams down there, and then after people got
their tickets then you had to…for renewal you had to have a certain number
refresher points and courses (I used to teach those too), which was a bone for me
because since I gave the course I could give myself the number of points I
needed to get my ticket renewed.
Tom: I remember [Beal], Dave [Beal] and I taking one of those courses from you
somewhere ( I can’t remember where) to get our…
Ed: (He chuckles as he says:) This stuff all runs together. You figure I’ve got thirty-three
years of teaching this thing out there. Just for the heck of it, somebody
from Washington, oh about 1983 or 4 wanted to know just how many things we
had written in the course of the year, and it seems to me I added it up, and I had
over two hundred pieces of paper in print through articles and handbooks and
Ladd 14
manuals and this type of thing in the course of thirty some odd years, and that’s
a lot of paper. Some guy in the University’s got to [print a parishing]. I was just
doing it, I mean it was there.
Worked with the Cooperative Wildlife unit at U. Mass. quite a lot through
Wendell Dodge helping them out in their beaver projects and this type of thing in
the Quabbin Reservoir. If we couldn’t physically do it then, if we had equipment
that would make life easier for ‘em, we would just let ‘em use the boats and this
type of thing. If you go back to some of the old pictures and the eagle that they
used to plant out there at the quadrant to get ‘em acclimated to that thing, you
look at the boat that those people are riding around with and it belongs to us. It
basically was a era of cooperation: you can’t do it all alone, you don’t know
everything; there’s no way under the sun that you’re ever gonna know everything
so you get a problem and then you start digging and scratching around to see who
knows what the heck is going on with that particular problem, then you siphon
what information you can get from everybody and his brother and then try to put
it all together until you come up with a logical answer to solve whatever the
problem is you’ve got. I hope that is still going on.
Tom: Oh it is, yeah.
Ed: And then, what was it, 1986 when they transferred the Division of Wildlife
Assistance from Fish and Wildlife Service to the Department of Agriculture, and
that was like taking a cold shower. That was an entirely new organization, new
department, new rules, new regulations. To be perfectly honest with you, when
most of us worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Division of Wildlife
Services we had an exceptionally good deal. [If] somebody had a problem they
would call up and say, “This is the problem….Solve it, ” and that’s the last we
heard of ‘em. They didn’t give us any guidelines to speak of or anything else, it
was “take care of this thing.” The Department of Agriculture is entirely different.
They don’t particularly like a bunch of free wheeling people out there. I guess
they kinda like to keep things under control.
Tom: More bureaucratic I guess.
Ed: More bureaucratic. I think it was hard for a lot of the old timers like myself to
accept because we had spent twenty-some odd years basically running our own
show because we knew what we were doing and we knew how to get these things
done, and then all of a sudden we had somebody else breathing down our neck,
and to be candid about it, I saw three or four people running that new Animal
Control Division that I knew back when they worked for the Fish and Wildlife
Service and I knew why they didn’t work for the Fish and Wildlife Service, and
now all of a sudden I see ‘em running the new Division of Animal Control, and
Ladd 15
to be perfectly honest with you I didn’t see much hope for the Division of
Animal Control surviving. It bothered me, so I retired rather than put up with
that bureaucratic nonsense. But, it was a good thirty-some odd years Tom, I
enjoyed it, with the exception of the last year. I really enjoyed every minute of
it. You asked me “if you’d of stayed with the Fish and Wildlife Service,” I
probably would not have retired that early. I would have stayed on.
Side 2 Begins
Tom: So how old where you when you retired?
Ed: Fifty-five.
Tom: Oh, you were?
Ed: Yeah. Two weeks after my fifty-fifth birthday. Wendell Dodge and I took off at
the same time. Wendell and I have been good friends for a long time, forty-some
odd years and we both retired on the same day. He was a Cooperative Wildlife
Research…(unintelligible)…at U. Mass. and I was a station leader at Wildlife
Assistance for Mass., Connecticut and Rhode Island. Like I say, I don’t regret
any of the time. I in hindsight made a very good choice when I didn’t go with
the Corps of Engineers waterfowl lab or the fish lab out in, I think it was
Marion, Illinois or something like that, or any of the states that I could have gone.
I made a good choice.
Tom: I tell you what, you guys have really helped us out. It’s really funny because
when I’ve, you know I’ve ah, I guess this is like the fourth interview I’ve done
now, and they’ve all been Wildlife Assistance guys. The reason is is because I
think you guys were always there to help us out and I think we had a lot of fun
doing it too, which I think was the main thing.
Ed: Well, that’s half the battle right there.
Tom: Yeah. I remember the first time I met you it was at Great Meadows and we
were…
Ed: (Unintelligible)…
Ladd 16
Tom: Yeah. The very first time I think you started telling me about this special
chemical called [DRC-13-39], and the rest is history. But you know, with you
and Pete and…I guess it was just you and Pete that helped us out down there,
but we couldn’t have done it without you.
Ed: Well, Pete I’m sure, feels the same way I do. I know Al Gordon and the rest of
‘em do. Our forte in life was to help other people. I don’t think any of us were
ever looking for any publicity or any glory. In fact, we would have been just as
happy to stay in the background and let somebody else take all the accolades on
this stuff. That just made a lot more sense to us. And, you guys had a problem on
…(unintelligible)…and we had an answer to it because we had been fooling
around with this stuff for, I don’t know, several years and it just made logical
sense that we help you get started, take care of your problem on your refuge, just
like everything else, and I’ll admit we had a lot of fun doing this thing. I know
when the gull work that we did for several years down in around the Chatham
area was all over you had that big old building up at Monomoy, the refuge
headquarters, with the little Coast Guard life boat station, and for several years
in a row we had a going away party celebrating the end of the project where we
ate, pigged out on lobsters, clams and all that good stuff. That was kind of part
of the deal.
Tom: Sure.
Ed: We made a lot of friends during this thing, and all the refuge managers and things
like this, with a lot of state people in various states, waterfowl people of a half a
dozen different states and things like that, and you could rely upon them and I
hope they felt that they could rely upon us too, you know, scratch each other’s
back is what it amounted to.
Tom: You were still around when the coyotes started moving in too. Did you get
involved in coyotes at all?
Ed: No. Oh God, this goes back into the early sixties I guess. Bill Sheldon was at the
Cooperative Wildlife Unit and their so called coy dogs, and we dabbled around
the outside edge of it basically just to learn what was going on and what these
things were and this type of thing, but we were never really involved in this
thing. I got mixed up in a couple of coy dog “coyote” problems in Maine while I
was up there, but there really isn’t anything could have, you know, it’s like rabid
foxes: their there, their gonna expand, their filling a niche, there’s nothing you can
do to stop it, you just have to learn to live with it. It’s still taking place now. It’s
not coyotes now, I guess it’s black bears in Western Mass. Their having a ball
with those things and they just better learn to live with them ‘cause their here,
Ladd 17
including the one that wandered through here the other day.
Tom: Is that right? Well, there’s moose around too.
Ed: Yep.
Tom: The reason I mentioned that is because it’s just funny how thing change over the
years, you know, the different species that people have focused on has changed.
I know Carl Ferguson, he spent a lot of time on coyotes up in Maine. Now, I
don’t think anybody spends time on coyotes. I think everybody’s accepted them,
or bobcats, same thing. Remember Doug Mullins…(unintelligible)…bobcats
used to be public enemy number one.
Ed: He had a pet bobcat up at the University of Maine.
Tom: Yeah. Then bear I guess became public enemy number one, then everybody got
used to those and the coyotes became public enemy number one. I don’t know
what’s public enemy number…cormorants probably.
Ed: Probably. I can remember a couple of coyote calls we got back…
(unintelligible)….Invariably it would be some lady calling up on a Monday
morning, all upset because they heard crunching noise and squealing and yelling
in the back yard, and they’d turn the lights on and they watched a coyote eat the
family cat. There’s no way that you can answer that type of thing. You show a
lot of sympathy and then in a polite way suggest they get another cat and keep it
inside because it’s gonna happen again. Coyotes will walk a mile for a cat; it’s
free food.
Tom: Lately people…it’s funny you mentioned that because lately I’ve read a lot of
things, people have been really encouraging everybody to keep your cat inside
just because of the birds, you know, the number of birds they’re killing. So many
good, well intentioned people can’t accept the fact that birds, or that cats have
such a bad impact on birds.
Ed: Oh I think probably birds are maybe fourth or fifth down on the priority food list
for cats, and it’s happened in the past, it’s gonna continue to happen.
Tom: Millions and millions of birds every year.
Ed: Sure. Sure. We’ve got two cats right next door, Bernie and Buster. One hunts
here across the street and the other hunts down back, and invariably you see ‘em
going across the lawn with their tail up carrying a mouse, but every once in a
Ladd 18
while you’ll see ‘em goin’ across the lawn with a bird, little brown bird in their
mouth. It happens. So, maybe in a sense as far as the bird population is
concerned, the coyotes are doing everybody a favor.
Tom: Yeah, I don’t have any problem with coyotes. I like to hear ‘em at night. I hear
‘em a lot at night over where I am.
Ed: To be honest with you, I’d put a bee hive down back if I thought I could coax a
bear in, but I don’t think my neighbors would be too happy about it.
Tom: I remember one time collecting some gulls for you. You were giving gulls to
General Dynamics. I guess they were…
Ed: Oh yeah.
Tom: …throwing ‘em in the jet engines….
Ed: Stuffing them in the jet engines.
Tom: Yeah.
Ed: General Electric, the [Lynn] plant.
Tom: Oh, General Electric.
Ed: General Electric. [Pratt Whitney] collected their own birds down in Connecticut.
Yeah, that took place for several years. We used to go out and cannon net gulls.
Tried to ship ‘em to the plant out in Ohio, I think. Ship ‘em out alive, and the
same thing with starlings. They used to throw starlings in the jet engines, but
then they get a little weight specific, I mean they wanted a girl, a gull of a
certain body configuration and of a specific weight; very narrow parameters on
the weight, and you just can’t do that.
Tom: No.
Ed: And I think along toward the end of it they got down to the point where, going
through the literature and the books, the only gulls that I could find in the
Continental United States was the California gull, which would fall within the
weight limits they had set, and that kind of ended that. But, we did a lot of
strange things with gulls. Somebody from Denver came out…I guess Pete was
with me on this one, and we went up to a dump some place on the coast and
cannon netted a bunch of gulls and they had a bunch of [jessie] harnesses made
Ladd 19
out of velcro with weights of varying sizes that they put on their backs to
simulate transmitters, and we’d put ‘em on and they’d let ‘em go, and of course
the gulls were groggy and they would just kind of set around. It turned out that a
gull can carry a very, very small, very limited amount of weight. Some of those
gull never did get off the ground again. I had to go catch them and take the darn
straps off and turn ‘em loose. There were some weird things we got involved
with, but like I say, it made thirty-some odd years very, very interesting.
Tom: Oh yeah. That’s what I like about the job is just the variety, even working in the
regional office. There’s still a lot of variety.
Ed: And, there are very, very, very few people in thirty-some odd years that I didn't
enjoy working with. Couple of refuge managers kind of turned me off, but I’m
sure I turned ’em off too. Course a refuge manager is assigned a given piece of
ground. It has four corners to it, and he has to stay within that thing, and a
Wildlife Assistance Biologist was assigned a state or several states, but he didn’t
necessarily have to stay within that state because if the guy next door needed
help, and since there were seven or eight of us in the whole darn region we
would go wherever we had to go to help the guy, and to be perfectly honest
with you, along toward the end of it each one of us did travel authorization (you
get one too). Ours was restricted to the Continental United States and that was it,
I mean if some guy in Nevada needed help, presumably Jim Forbes and I could
go to Nevada to help this guy and nobody would say a word. It just gave us a lot
of freedom and a lot of latitude and we got mixed up in a lot of problems and we
learned an awful lot….(Unintelligible)…thirty-some odd years, much more than
we ever learned in school, and like I said before it was enjoyable until you had to
figure out budget problems, personnel problems, property problems; they were
not much fun, but what the heck, I mean, that’s part of it I guess. But, I also have
to say that when I retired, I’ve enjoyed that too.
Tom: That’s good
Ed: I’ve had a ball most of my life. I spent some time in Europe, compliments of the
United States Army. I enjoyed most of that. Some of it was a little bit grungy,
but what the heck.
Tom: Where were you? Austria?
Tom: Yeah. I spent two years in the Austrian Alps. I’m perched on one mountain top
looking at another mountain top, and the Russians were always looking back at
Ladd 20
me (he chuckles), or they could have been. But, that I think probably is the sum
total of thirty-some odd years of things, of stuff. I went from Predator and
Rodent Control to the Division of Wildlife Services to Wildlife Assistance.
Tom: Why do you think the Wildlife Assistance was transferred to the USDA?
Everybody at the time, I mean, everybody that I knew felt really bad about it not
only because of you guys personally, but because we just felt that there was a real
need for people, like you say, outside of refuges that are dealing with the average
person out there, the average citizen whose got a wildlife problem.
Ed: I think it was political. Wildlife Assistance, well, it’s always been that way.
You’d have an eastern section and a western. Of course the western section was
involved primarily with the livestock industry, and they always felt that the
Fish and Wildlife Service did not appreciate their problems, that only Agriculture
could appreciate their problems, and they tried for years, and years and years to
get back, this thing back into the open, the old Bureau system, where it first
started out, the Division of Entomology I guess. They just kept working on their
Congressmen until they finally got this thing established. Agriculture of course
wanted it because livestock and agriculture, and this would help the livestock
industry. But, I do know for a fact that after this transition took place, there were
a lot of those people out there that pushed for the transfer to Agriculture were not
exactly that happy with what happened and they kinda wished then that they’d
kept their mouths shut and left things well enough alone because it didn’t turn out
quite the way that they figured it was gonna be. They figured that they would
have, basically the free-wheeling operation to do whatever they wanted to do to
protect sheep and cattle and this type of thing and it just didn’t work out that way.
Number one, money was tight. I don’t think any of us east of the Mississippi
River really wanted that transfer. In fact, a lot of us really were deadly against
that thing, and to be honest with you, did what we could do to stop it from
happening because we could see the end of a, of our ability to do what we had
been doing for thirty-odd years, and that’s basically take a problem and solve it
with a minimum of fuss, muss and bureaucracy is what it amounted to. We
could see it coming and it did happen that way. The transfer itself was pure, plain
politics. In fact, most of use were assured that this was not gonna happen, and it
was snuck in, as I understand it, at one of the budget bills and passed at midnight
or something like this, one of these type of deals, and the next thing, you come to
work Monday morning, they say, “Congratulations. Your working for the
Department of Agriculture."
Tom: Well, there’s still that need out there to…the need hasn’t decreased at all.
Ed: No, because…well, in this region right here you’ve got, you’ve got two Wildlife
Ladd 21
unit type of operations left. You have refuges, which is a fixed unit, a fixed
land based unit, and you have Ecological Services (I guess that’s what they’re
called), which is an oversight agency, but you really have nobody to got outside
of the two existing agencies and pull stuff in and work to solve these problems
which were there then and are there now. I guess it was you that called up; you
had a problem on a [Turn] colony down on the Cape or something like that. Well,
"how do you keep foxes from getting to this thing?" I don’t remember what I told
you, but I must have told you something, you didn’t call me back. Either it was a
good answer or a ridiculous answer, but it was on the national seashore down
there. It’s this type of thing.
A refuge to me…you’ve got a fixed piece of ground, you have a fixed
Management plan and you have a mission in life, and this is…when these
extraneous problems come in you really don’t have the time to sit down and
analyze these things and spend a lot of time developing an answer, and this is
where we came in because we had a backlog of information and a backlog of
contacts and this type of thing. We could take a problem and start digging and
squirreling around and find out pretty much everything that had been done on that
problem for the last two hundred years. Bring it in and compile this information
and sort through it, and come up with some kind of an answer. Maybe not the
best answer in the world, but an answer that would maybe solve part of the
problem. This to me was what we could contribute. And, I think probably they
still can contribute to this thing, except that once an agency like Wildlife Services
is separated from the home base, so to speak, the tendency for closer cooperation
is not there. Interior does not really like to go to Agriculture to solve a problem,
nor does Agriculture want to go to Interior to solve a problem.
Tom: Well, the biggest problem that we’ve got with them now is that they, they have to
charge for everything. So, if you’re Joe Homeowner somewhere they have to
charge ‘em for it, and if you’re the Fish and Wildlife Service they have to charge
us for it.
Ed: We did it for nothing.
Tom: Yeah. It was funny because when I was up in Maine, [Godden] asked me to come
down and train somebody on 13-39. Being in the Fish and Wildlife Service I just
got in the car and did my little thing, went back, and then because at that point in
time there was a little bit of controversy over who had the registration, I don’t
know if you remember that….
Ed: No, I’d gotten out of there by then.
Tom: The 13-39 registration had stayed with the USDA, which of course I think was a
Ladd 22
Mistake, but so even though I did the training, when it came time to put the 13-39
out on whatever island it was (I can’t remember), I had to pay [Godden] to come
to do…it was crazy….(Tom laughs about the situation he just described)
Ed: He’s probably still laughing about that. (They both chuckle).
Well, in a sense I can see where [Godden] and a lot of the newer people are being
forced into this thing.
Tom: Oh sure.
Ed: [Godden] wouldn’t have charged you. He would have just let it go, but he had no
choice I’m sure….
Tom: He had no choice.
Ed: He had no choice. This was the Agriculture way of doing business.
Tom: Exactly.
Ed: “We charge you for everything.” If Wildlife Assistance had stayed….Now let’s
face it, there weren’t that many of us. There were what, eight in the region,
something like that?
Tom: Something like that.
Ed: Alright. Just rename it, but keep it in the region to solve the, basically the
problems of the Fish and Wildlife Service, and things like this. It probably would
have been a bigger benefit, and if Agriculture wanted to do the animal damage
control, let ‘em go do it.
Tom: Right.
Ed: And when you stop and look at it, because we realize this perhaps more than
anybody else, Wildlife Assistance, when it separated from Fish and Wildlife
Service actually was two separate divisions, east of the Mississippi River and
west of the Mississippi river.
Tom: That’s right.
Ed: We were never accepted by those people. We didn’t even want to be accept by
those people because we could care less about killing coyotes to save a damn
sheep, pardon my language. That was a dull routine, I mean you do the same
Ladd 23
thing day, after day, after day, after day.
Tom: Right.
Ed: When I first went up and started that office at the University of Maine, one of the
monthly things we had to do was we had to put together a monthly activity sheet.
Thirty days and everyday we would put in what we were gonna do on Monday,
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, four consecutive weeks, and we did
it. We knew full well that on Monday on that sheet we probably would do what
we were suppose to do, but from Tuesday on it was anybody’s guess because you
had no idea what the telephone was gonna bring or what the mail was gonna
bring, and whatever problem. I think it was probably more interesting and more
important that what we had put down on that piece of paper and sent to the
regional office. One of our prime activities in the field was to keep the regional
office in the dark most of the time. (Tom chuckles). It was no fun that way.
I’ve been retired for twelve years. I can tell you this stuff. There isn’t a darn
thing you can do about it anymore. (They both laugh).
Tom: The truth is out there.
Ed: Sure it is.
Tom: I appreciate you taking the time…
Ed: That’s O.K. I enjoyed it. I like to reminisce occasionally, but I don’t go back to
the office and reminisce. Laura Handy is a nice young lady and I like Laura a
lot, but it’s an entirely different organization. I don’t know the people anymore.
I don’t want to know the people anymore. It’s like…(unintelligible)…when I
retired and I walked out the door. Basically what I said was, “ I ain’t a
biologist no mo’,” and I haven’t been. I’ve been doing other things.

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Interview with Edward Ladd
June 13, 2000
Interviewed by: Tom Goettell
Tom: O.K. It’s June 13th, 2000, right?
Ed: Yep.
Tom: And it’s ah…we’re sitting here in Amherst, Massachusetts. My name is Tom
Goettell and we’re talking to Ed Ladd who retired about a dozen years ago from
Wildlife Assistance, the Wildlife Assistance branch of the Fish and Wildlife
Service, which at that time was actually with the U.S.D.A., but I’m sure he’ll tell
us about that. Ed, how’d you get into Wildlife?
Ed: Well, I went to the University of Maine and graduated with a degree in Wildlife
Conservation oh, 1958 I guess. Took the standard government entrance exams.
Had interviews for the Fish and Wildlife lab in Illinois, If I remember correctly,
Army Corps of Engineers lab down in Louisiana and found this job with the Fish
and Wildlife Service strictly by accident…(unintelligible)…and interviewed for
that job, and of course the initial opening was here in Amherst, which is a lot
closer to my home in Maine than Louisiana. And since I had a pregnant wife
at the time it was a lot quicker to get down here and take this job than it would
to move to Louisiana, and really I am glad that I did from what I understand. The
Service, over the thirty years that I spent with it, was a lot easier organization to
work with than the Army Corps of Engineers and the Forest Service. But, that’s
basic…I started right here in Amherst under the old Predator and Road, P. and
R.C., Predator and Rodent Control Division.
Tom: And you were in charge of Western Massachusetts in the Rodent Control Fund.
You’re from Maine originally?
Ed: Yes, yes.
Tom: From right around Orono, at Orono…Brewer was it?
Ed: Brewer.
Tom: Brewer, yeah.
Ed: Bangor-Brewer complex. It’s about eight miles down the river from Orono,
where the University is.
Ladd 2
Tom: Uh-huh.
Ed: It was real quick and real convenient.
Tom: So you spent, you started out here in Amherst and then where did they take ya?
Ed: Well, let’s see, 19, it was 1961; they wanted an office in Maine so they assigned
me to an office at the University of Maine, and I started the office up there and
stayed there until 19, 1966 I believe. Went up there for the first time, couldn’t
even find a key to the door. Opened it up; the office furniture consisted of a
piece of plywood on two saw horses, and three boxes of old files they’d
scrounged up from somewhere and that was it, and the car that I’d brought from
Amherst with odds and ends of equipment in it. That sufficed for probably about
six months until we could get a desk, and a filing cabinet, and a chair and some of
this other stuff.
Tom: So what types of projects did you work on up there?
Ed: Well, initially I was sent up there to work in cooperation with the U.S. Forest
Service Research Station in Bradley, and the University. Arthur Hart was in
charge of the station. There was a research forester, a teacher from U. Mass and
myself, and they were interested in studying the effects of mice and birds on
reforestation: how much seed do they eat, this type of thing. We set up about a
five acre plot, I guess it was in the Penobscott Research Forest, and I did the bird
and mammal measurements and they did the seed measurements and this type of
thing. And that went on for…well, I guess they wrote the report after I
transferred out in ’66. A lot of the time was working with the Forest Service --
Maine Forest Service and U.S. Forest Service. I did some more mammal and bird
study work down at the [Massubeesiks] down in [Elkroods], reforestation seed
protection with the Maine Forest Service -- basically out watching the county I
guess and this type of thing. Now this [was] in addition to meeting and trying to
set up contacts with the Extension Service and all the typical people you would
work with in Wildlife Assistance. One of the other projects, and this was about
19, I’ll say ’63 and ’64, that’s when the first rabid fox showed up in Maine.
[Cart] Palmer actually spearheaded the operation even though the state, you
know, the project was in my district, and they brought in people from
Pennsylvania and several other Wildlife Assistance districts and they poisoned
basically foxes, raccoons, any of the of the predators which would contract rabies
and spread it around over the northwestern part of the state. We spent about a
month doing that.
Tom: Wow. Boy, that’s a huge area.
Ladd 3
Ed: It sure is. It sure is.
Tom: And did it have, did it work? Did it have any effect?
Ed: I think the basic premise was that if you could cut the population down, then the
chances of one rabid animal meeting another rabid animal would lessen to a
degree, but no it didn’t. A couple of us went back in, I guess it was the fall and
did another small area where a rabid fox had gotten into a barn or something like
this and chased a horse or something or other, and re-treated another area, but
rabies is probably scattered throughout the state right now. It has been for a
number of years.
Tom: And what did you use for bait?
Ed: Strychnine.
Tom: Strychnine. In eggs?
Ed: No, it was a [tallow] bait. We put together a little hole and plug method where we
could make little [tallow] drop baits, about the size of a nickel, and we’d put some
[tallow] in it, put the pill in it, put some more [tallow] in it and squeeze it and
push it out the other side. We’d end up with a sack full of bait for everybody, and
they could go out and spread ‘em at the prescribed level and a prescribed distance
and this type of thing. Hit or miss type of thing. You’d go down roadways and
drop one or two here, and here, and here and down the road. Presumably a fox or
raccoon would hit ‘em, and we did get a lot of foxes and raccoons, but it never
had the desired effect. The state took the program on after we got out of it, did
the same thing for another couple of years. But, most of it was typical Northeast
type rodent patrol, animal control work where if somebody would have a
problem we would investigate the problem, try to figure out why it happened and
what could be done to alleviate it, and give them the information and perhaps the
tools to do the job and get ‘em headed in the right direction and head off for the
next project somewhere.
Tom: So, would it be like farmyards, just guys with people’s barns or…
Ed: It could be farmyards, bats in the belfry, bats in the attic, you know, typical small
animal type work. A couple of times I’ve been involved, at least initially, with…
(unintelligible)…the power mill, the paper mill down in Bucksport. They had a
large, presumably a large porcupine problem in a couple areas. We checked that
out, but basically it wasn’t worth the effort to do anything about it. It would be
something of this nature. And then like I say, in 1966 the position, John
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Peterson’s position in Amherst opened up, and it was a promotion and so I took
that job, moved back down here. Spent the next thirty-some odd years down here,
well, twenty-some odd years down here.
Tom: Now, did you get involved in any of the cormorant work in Maine or
Massachusetts?
Ed: No, that came two or three supervisors after me. (Unintelligible)…took the
position after I left, and of course they moved the office from the University of
Maine down to Augusta. He got involved with pigeon work, things of that nature.
I’m not sure if Frank was involved in cormorants or not. He did some of the
initial work with 13-39 on crows and the Bangor dump I think, and I think he
did…yeah he was there. There was the initial 13-39 work done on gulls and the
town where President Bush had his summer home, and I’ve forgotten the name.
Tom: Kennabunkport?
Ed: Kennabunkport. I know we treated ‘em at the dump and then we scoured the bay
down there looking for the results without too much luck. And of course, a lot of
the follow up of the secondary work on 13-39 on gulls was done here in
Massachusetts. We got some of the toxic results from Denver on what it would
and would not effect. (Unintelligible)…unit up at U. Mass. did some more of the
work; we threw our two cents worth in, and basing and putting together how big
a dosage it would need and what kind of a carrier you would use it on. This was
where the [O-E-O] and 1339 and bread came out and cut up in little squares and
put it in their nests and things of this nature. And that all stimulated because of
our …(unintelligible)…from the Mass. Audubon Society and Bill Drewry. They
had tried to kill gulls on some of their breeding islands with [alphachlorilals] and
two or three other materials, and it didn’t work. As I understand it, they came to
the regional director for help and that’s when we got involved with 13-39 for
gulls; a director request from Mass. Audubon.
Tom: And that was….Some of their colonies were down in Chatham, I think, [Turn
Island] was there…
Ed: Yeah, [Turn Island], [Ruckchatham], couple up further up in the bay,
[Nomanswoe]; there was another one down there. I’ve forgotten the name of that
one. Bird Island further on down the coast. All together there was probably
eight or nine islands, a bunch of ‘em, and I know that, and they were done for
several consecutive years in a row, particularly that one at Bird Island. It was the
one that had the [Turns] on it and the lighthouse. That was done every year for
about three or four years. Helping [Ian Nesbit] do that job.
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Tom: And that was, it worked, right? I mean it was very successful.
Ed: Oh, it went very, very well, I mean, we could basically through timing and a
couple of repeat operations pretty much take care of a gull population for that
season on any one given colony. You know, you go in through one, one
operation you would get a large percentage of ‘em and then you have, many
times go through with a second treatment for re-nesters and things like that
because which ever gull came back to the nest first had a tendency to eat the
three baits, and that meant the other one was still hanging around lose so you
had to come back through and retrieve ‘em. And let’s see, I guess we did
[Monahoy] once. I helped the refuge people do [Monahoy] once or twice; I’ve
forgotten how many times I was out there. That kept us busy for several years.
Another one was when they were doing the basic survey work in Boston
Harbor. We did the rodent work and some of the bird and mammal survey work
on all of those, and there was twenty-one different islands out there in Boston
Harbor, and that kept us busy pretty much one whole summer doing that and
writing the report, sending out to the powers that be.
Tom: Why did they do that?
Ed: At that time they were doing the preliminary work turning the Boston Harbor
Islands into a state park or national park or a combination of both, and I guess
they actually succeeded. It is a state park. Just about all of those islands out
there are state parks right now. It’s surprising though, the wildlife that is out
there, the species of birds. The historical part of this thing is fantastic. I
mean there’s a gun emplacement on practically every island out there. One of
the islands had an immigrant reception station very similar to the one in
Rikers Island, old hospitals. I think, yeah, there’s a big military hospital on one.
There are forts all over the place out there. Everything goes back to about the
Civil War down to World War I and II. I enjoyed that one, I enjoyed that one
immensely.
Tom: Is there a lot of birds nesting out there?
Ed: Yes. Course you have your couple three species of gulls, black crown night
herons, and all of your various song birds and things like that. Spectacle
Island, which is the old dumping ground right off the end of Logan, had a
black crown night heron colony and a whole bunch of gulls. In fact, that one
there became a bird hazard for Logan it self and we tried an experiment of
putting two foxes out there during the nesting season to keep the gulls stirred
up, but I guess they were a little bit too tame. They would come right down to
the beach and meet the boat so to speak, which helped with an early demise for
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those two. Logan is an interesting place and I first started on in 1958, right
after that [electric] crash killing a hundred or so people. I spent a lot of time at
Logan Airport just plain moving birds so that this would not happen again.
Somebody was doing the investigations on that thing, and we used to take
candidates down there marking gulls to see where they were coming and where
they were coming from, did a basic habitat survey to see what was attracting
birds and what birds were being attracted. That’s where the initial work was
done to outline the ponds, the grass cover, the dump that they had at Logan at that
time, which attracted a lot of blackbirds and this type of thing. Had a series of
these carbide cannons out there to move birds, shot gun patrols, cracker shells,
every conceivable device you could think of was out there just to move birds off
that airport.
Tom: And did that work?
Ed: As long as you kept after ‘em, but they had to do a lot of vegitative habitat
control. Basically they were told they had to fill in those ponds, get rid of the
dump, start mowing the grass, cut back on the trash and available food and this
type of thing because they were running, at least in my mind, a bird sanctuary at
an airport simultaneously on the same piece of ground, but that’s not unusual
because at that time probably half the airports at that time were doing the same
thing. It was one of those things that you just didn’t realize.
Tom: Yeah. That was one of the things that got you guys started on gull control too,
wasn’t it, with that [electric]…
Ed: That [electric] thing, right. I don’t think anybody really paid that much attention
to what the gulls where doing at that time. You had gulls actually nesting on parts
of the airport, you had people digging clams on the clam flats at low tide which
attracted gulls. Like I said, you had all these islands out there in the actual flight
path which were serving as nesting islands, Spectacle Island and a whole bunch of
others. It was just a natural. Boston Harbor is a natural for raising birds.
Tom: Yeah. I heard a story one time that when Eisenhower was President, I think it was
1960 when he was still President, his Air Force I sucked in a gull and one of the
engines cut, and that lead to some money for gull funding too….
Ed: (Unintelligible)…that would have taken place in the regional office at that time or
somewhere up the line. If it floated down, you know, I knew nothing about that
one. I know Eisenhower was instrumental in getting Canada geese moved in
Connecticut. So, law enforcement told me that whenever this thing started, one of
the, White Plains I think it was, one of the golf courses; he was scheduled to play
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golf down there and there where geese crapping all over the place. The word was
put out that it would be nice if those geese were not there when President
Eisenhower came through to play, so consequently the geese weren’t there when
Eisenhower came through to play. They were just politely moved somewhere
else, and that started a whole ‘nother fiasco.
Tom: Which was the trapping of…
Ed: The trapping and the movement of gulls for what, ten years or something like
that?
Tom: Geese. ‘Cause I remember when I was in Maine I remember you coming up to
[Cutler]. I remember you bringing truck loads of Canada geese up to [Cutler] and
dumping them out. They were banding ‘em, dump ‘em off at the naval base
there.
Ed: Put ‘em off at the naval radio station there in [Cutler] for about two or three
years, and then Pat called from the Maine Fish and Wildlife. He used to come
down and he’d haul a truckload back every year for several years in a row. More
birds, at least from the work that, the gathering after we did in Connecticut were
shipped to West Virginia. We never did round up geese in Massachusetts. All of
the geese problems in Rhode Island where taken care of by Charlie Allen and
Rhode Island Fish and Wildlife. We did basically the round up of birds in
Connecticut, which is where it started. We just didn’t expand it beyond that state.
Several other states got involved, but they were in different districts. A lot of
geese were moved. We’d move anywhere from three, four five hundred birds a
year out of the state of Connecticut alone. Then you would go back to the same
site year after year after year and take the same number of birds off. All different
birds, and none of them were, very few were banded because all of the birds
captured and removed and transported and removed where all banded, so it was
entirely a new crop of birds. A classic example I guess where nature abhors a
vacuum. I mean, you create a vacuum and she’ll fill that thing right in, and they
did it year after year after year, and their still there.
Tom: Were you ever down in Muskeget? Were you ever involved down there in any
of the bird work?
Ed: Let’s see, Muskeget. That’s the one off Nantucket, right?
Tom: Nantucket, yeah.
Ed: [Rainey Bolinger]. I spent two weeks out there once, about ’60, ’64 or ’65 I
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guess. Dave [Wetherby] was working on a chemical called [“Sudan Black”],
which is fed to gulls; turned the yolk carbon black, turned it black so they would
not develop. So [Rainey] and I were put out there for two weeks basically to
survey that place and create a grid system where they could put out some kind of
a geometric system of distributing [Sudan Black] treated herring in the…
(unintelligible). That is all that I had to do with it initially. I was stationed in
Maine at the time. [Rainey] was in, I guess he was in [Weston]. Anyway, we
went out there. Pete and somebody were out there, and we replaced them. So,
we tried to survey the thing. We created basically a baseline down through the
middle of the islands and did some of the topography work showing where the
ponds and the hills, and this type of thing, where the old runway system was and
the buildings. Drank a lot of stagnant, salty water because the well system wasn’t
too hot.
Tom: So there was a runway on Muskeget too?
Ed: Yeah. There were two cabins on there. One was a fish wardens camp on one end
and the other one belonged to a guy by the name of Snow who was somehow or
another connected with the Massachusetts Civil Air Patrol or something like that.
He was a flier and he had a runway. In fact, this was one of the reasons this place
was used as an experimental plot. He had a hard time flying in and out of that
place because the gulls on this grass runway he had there. I went back there
several years later when we were doing this coastal seabird thing and the gull
population on Muskeget had really, really gone down tremendously. It dropped
way down, but then it had dropped in several other places too.
Tom: And was that mostly herring gulls or herring…
Ed: mostly Heron, gulls and a few Black Backs, which is pretty much all that were
located on the coast then. I’m not sure whether there were other species or not.
Tom: Yeah, see great black backs have gone way up now.
Ed: Have they?
Tom: Yeah. Herring gulls have probably gone down a little bit. And I know you were
involved in No Man’s Land quite a bit.
Ed: My private little refuge. (they chuckle). I’m not sure, well yeah I do too. Charlie
Malloy was made the area manager and Charlie Malloy was a stickler for the way
things should be, and I think No Man’s Land was basically under the, was being
surveyed or worked by the regional office. And since it wasn’t military land and
Ladd 9
since part of the job of Wildlife Assistance was to provide wildlife services to
military reservations and things like that, he basically took No Man’s Land
away from the regional office and plumped it down in my desk. I used to
make two, three, four trips a year out there basically just to see what was going
on, survey nesting birds. Used to make over flights with Ralph Anders for
turn colonies, turn numbers, gulls numbers and this type of thing; survey as
much as one person could do it, and whenever ducks where nesting out there, and
the geese and this type of thing; keep an eye on the turn colonies. There were no
biting flies out there so that was nice, and there were no mammals out there with
the exception of a few muskrats, which that population never seemed to develop
a lot, a few turtles. We got a habitat map done on that place. Working with the
people from the U.S. Navy we got basically a line drawn down through the
middle of it because this was a bombing and target range for the U.S. Navy/
Marine Corps, and anybody else that were flying around, so that they would stay
to one side of the line and just basically leave the other side alone. The place,
when I first went out there, was almost impenetrable with rose bushes and you
know, just plain brush. You had to practically cut your way through that thing,
and one way or another we got that place burned so that the brush would go down
and your grasses started and basically a more diversified habitat so you get more
diversified bird cover in there. And, that’s pretty much the way it was left when
I was transferred, well, when the section was transferred from the Fish and
Wildlife Service to the Department of Agriculture. You’d just make your bird
survey’s whenever possible, fight off any attempt for somebody to hit at [his]
deer or something else out there because it was basically a good bird refuge.
Why change it? And, it was contributing a few ducks, blacks and things like that
to the flyway every year.
Tom: Were there sheep out there?
Ed: They were originally. That was, it was taken from a family back in the early
forty’s, probably just about the beginning of World War II, and they had sheep
and rabbits out there. When they left, all of the other livestock went with it.
There were farm buildings and this type of thing. The Navy created a runway on
the south end of the island. They had two or three buildings out there. The
runway is kind of interesting itself. If you look at it, if you fly in and look at it, it
had just about the same length of a World War II carrier and the edge of the
runway was the edge of the island, so you took off from the runway like you,
basically, similarly like you were taking off from a carrier. This is the way I
looked at it. Nobody would confirm it one way or another, and you either made it
into the air or you swallowed a lot of the Atlantic Ocean out there, airplane and
all. And, then it was turned into, during the Vietnam War they dug pits out there
and they put in simulated sand missiles. Then later on it became, they just, some
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high speed jet target practice, but a lot of it was helicopter target practice out
there. In fact, a Marine Reserve unit would fly me out, and leave me and come
pick me up either the same day or the next day or something like that. It was
kind of interesting. Six hundred and twenty acres of mine (he chuckles). First
time you go out there they send a medic with you, they send a demolition
expert with you. Basically they would send about five people with you,
including a warrant officer or an NCO, Navy NCO of some kind just to make
sure you behaved yourself, but after about the second or third trip, I mean this
became an expense and you, you know, they could see you’re not gonna start
gathering up spent ammunition and used bombs and that kind of stuff, and you
kind of stayed away, so they’d just trust you. They’d just fly you out there, they’d
drop you off and they’d come back in the afternoon, pick you up and haul you out
of there. It was simple as that. You had the place to yourself for a number of
hours, and it’s small enough so that you could do a fairly decent survey job – a
quick overlook anyway within a one days time period.
Tom: Do you remember how many turns you had out there at the time?
Ed: No, there was…(Unintelligible)…,a few…(Unintelligible)…and every once in a
while you’d pick up a pair or two of [Rosiettes], and they were on the, oh see,
it would be the little sand flats up in the north, north-northeast end toward
Martha’s Vineyard. I can’t give you numbers. The gull population used to stay
relatively stable, maybe twenty, twenty-five thousand birds out there. Every year
there would probably be oh, somewhere between ten and fifteen nesting pair of
Canada geese, occasionally a Mute Swan would show up, but they never lasted; a
few Green Snakes, you know, Garter Snakes, this type of thing; no mice.
Tom: What kind of turtles? Do you remember?
Ed: No I don’t.
Tom: You say the Mute Swans wouldn’t last.
Ed: They just never stayed, I mean, you’d see them floating around there. I never saw
an indication that they nested. They just, I guess, flew in from Martha’s Vineyard
and hung around for a while, then flew back again. In fact, I never saw more than
one out there. (Unintelligible)…mated there; just one bird. It was on two or three
instances I think.
Tom: I don’t know if there’s any Mute Swans out there now, but they certainly are all
over the place. Their a big problem in Rhode Island, Connecticut and…
thousands of ‘em.
Ladd 11
Ed: With ah, I guess it was Charlie Allen, Rhode Island Fish and Wildlife, we had a
couple of projects going, one project going for two or three summers on various
ways to treat Mute Swan eggs in the nest so that they just wouldn’t develop. One
was basically pick ‘em up and shake ‘em, another one was an oil base spray.
Spray the egg and it just kind of sealed it up. That was done in several places in
Rhode Island. It was also done at the, oh that big estate on Martha’s Vineyard --
the one that Jacquelyn Kennedy bought, way before she bought it. John [Lenear]
worked for me at that time; he kind of ran that part of the operation. It worked,
but you know it’s a labor-intensive thing. First of all you gotta find all of those
Mute Swan nests, and then you have to do it in a very subtle manner because
people like swans.
See, what else? Environmental Impact Statements; did a lot of those. This is kind
of the way things worked. You got into Environmental Impact Statements and
a lot of that stuff came to Wildlife Services, and we did the initial, you know,
started this thing out initially. Pesticide surveillance; we did a lot of that work
initially. Wildlife management on military reservations; we did a lot of this stuff
initially, and then eventually it was passed onto somebody else, Ecological
Services or they would create a division to take care of pesticides or something
like this. But, we got in basically on the initial work on a lot of these various
programs when they first came down the road.
A bunch of us did a lot of the pesticide surveillance work in Maine for…
(unintelligible)…or the Forest Service…(unintelligible)…you know, thousands
and thousands of acres up there. We started out with, I think, the last DDT spray,
and several others of the various fire arms that we used for one reason or another.
We broke into initial survey work and then tried to evaluate what happened after
they sprayed this thing and see if there was any measurable effect on the various
bird species. I got sent pretty close to a month to Panama on loan to the
Department of Agriculture in the Air Force because they wanted to spray, I guess
they were gonna spray parts of Vietnam for mosquito control, but rather than
ship us to Vietnam where it was a little hot and tense at the time, we went to a
military reservation in Panama, and they sprayed it and we measured the fish
problem, you know, the possibility of fish damage and bird damage in Panama for
the Department of Agriculture in the Air Force, which was an interesting trip.
Tom: Yeah, I bet.
Ed: I needed a standard though, a standard…(unintelligible). I’ll go anywhere, any
time for no more than a month, and then I’d come back. They just never seemed
to take me up on it.
Most of the work, let’s see, I came down to Massachusetts in 1966 and retired in
January 1, 1988. These various little incidents that took place, like you know
Boston Harbor Islands and Canada Geese and Impact Statements and No Man’s
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Land and things like that, that was kind of the gravy. A lot of the time we were
working with Agriculture on their orchard mouse problems and their bird
problems and things like this. With Jim Forbes, when he first came to work for
me in 1966, he started a project of working with an experimental orchard mouse
control toxin, and then he carried it over to New York State when he finally
transferred over there. During the fall months and winter months, early winter
months, several different orchards, as we would survey these things and then we
would treat them with this experimental material to see if that would do a better
job of controlling orchard mice than the existing zinc [phosphide], but it never
did. We got to know a lot of pine and meadow mice on a first hand basis this way
though, I mean, survey several thousand acres of those darn things.
And, let’s see, O.K. We were involved in bird hazards to aircraft. Like I say, one
of the first projects I had when I came to work with the old Division of Predator
and Rodent Control was Logan Airport and that electric crash, and that kind of
died down for a while and then, I guess Al [Godden] was down in New Jersey
about the time they started having a lot of problems at Kennedy, and Al
[Godden] actually developed a system of surveying an airport for bird hazards.
And through Al (there were a bunch of us), Al [Godden], Jim [Forbes], myself
and two or three other people, for a while they were running training courses for
airport personnel, for the FAA and things like this, and training people to
recognize a bird hazard at an airport and what you could do about it to minimize
that problem, and we did that in several different airports, including FAA
headquarters, the main airport down in Virginia. My part in those things was
describe the working tools that you had to work with, and then give them an
overview of what had happened at Logan over the years and how that thing had
progressed from basically a bird refuge back into a full-time airport with a
minimum of problems.
One of the other projects, things that we did, at least I did on a continuous basis
and that was teaching students at colleges. I had a one afternoon, three-hour
course at the University of Rhode Island every year for twenty-one years…
Tom: No kidding.
Ed: …where you would show these students what the various types of traps were and
what they would do and why they were different sizes and how you would set
them and this type of thing, and what fur prices where worth at that given time
and this type of thing. And, the University of Connecticut on several occasions,
basically a class on wildlife damage control using traps and repellents and sound
and noise and how to identify damage, what causes problems and what you could
do to minimize these problems. When I was at the station up in Maine stationed
at the University of Maine for three, I guess it was three years, they held a Maine
Warden Training School at the University of Maine and I taught a session on the
Ladd 13
use of steel in live traps and things like this to the Maine Warden Service, and I
did a couple of those same sessions down here in Massachusetts for the
Environmental Police about the time that they took on several other different
entities. I guess they incorporated the Marine Police and the Inland Police, and
basically became the Environmental Police Force that they have now. That was
through Jim [Madamski] and Tom [Ricardi]. You do what educational work you
can. Two or three of these same types of courses were held [for] the students at
the University of Massachusetts, they were held at the University of Maine, the
University of Connecticut, the University of Rhode Island, the University of
New Hampshire. I think the only one that I missed, Cornell, the only one I
missed was the University of Vermont, and I’m not sure how that got missed.
Somebody goofed up I guess, I don’t know.
When the states became involved in pesticide registration I became involved
with the pesticide coordinator at the University of Massachusetts in writing the
handbook that they used for one of the, one of the sections, basically wildlife
damage control, this type of thing. The ironic thing of that – I wrote the
handbook, people studied the handbook, people took the test to get their ticket, I
wrote the test to get the ticket; I had to take my own test to get my ticket for
pesticide…(unintelligible because Tom and Ed both chuckle), and it was an open
book test, I mean, you could take the book in there, so I just took the list of
answers in, I mean hell, I wrote the test, I knew what the answers were, but I
wasn’t gonna screw it up.
Tom: Saved a lot of time.
Ed: Saved a lot of time. And, the same thing happened in the state of Connecticut,
although they were gracious enough to give me a complementary ticket down
there. But, I used to run the courses and I wrote the, passed the manual, wrote
the exams and basically gave the exams down there, and then after people got
their tickets then you had to…for renewal you had to have a certain number
refresher points and courses (I used to teach those too), which was a bone for me
because since I gave the course I could give myself the number of points I
needed to get my ticket renewed.
Tom: I remember [Beal], Dave [Beal] and I taking one of those courses from you
somewhere ( I can’t remember where) to get our…
Ed: (He chuckles as he says:) This stuff all runs together. You figure I’ve got thirty-three
years of teaching this thing out there. Just for the heck of it, somebody
from Washington, oh about 1983 or 4 wanted to know just how many things we
had written in the course of the year, and it seems to me I added it up, and I had
over two hundred pieces of paper in print through articles and handbooks and
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manuals and this type of thing in the course of thirty some odd years, and that’s
a lot of paper. Some guy in the University’s got to [print a parishing]. I was just
doing it, I mean it was there.
Worked with the Cooperative Wildlife unit at U. Mass. quite a lot through
Wendell Dodge helping them out in their beaver projects and this type of thing in
the Quabbin Reservoir. If we couldn’t physically do it then, if we had equipment
that would make life easier for ‘em, we would just let ‘em use the boats and this
type of thing. If you go back to some of the old pictures and the eagle that they
used to plant out there at the quadrant to get ‘em acclimated to that thing, you
look at the boat that those people are riding around with and it belongs to us. It
basically was a era of cooperation: you can’t do it all alone, you don’t know
everything; there’s no way under the sun that you’re ever gonna know everything
so you get a problem and then you start digging and scratching around to see who
knows what the heck is going on with that particular problem, then you siphon
what information you can get from everybody and his brother and then try to put
it all together until you come up with a logical answer to solve whatever the
problem is you’ve got. I hope that is still going on.
Tom: Oh it is, yeah.
Ed: And then, what was it, 1986 when they transferred the Division of Wildlife
Assistance from Fish and Wildlife Service to the Department of Agriculture, and
that was like taking a cold shower. That was an entirely new organization, new
department, new rules, new regulations. To be perfectly honest with you, when
most of us worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Division of Wildlife
Services we had an exceptionally good deal. [If] somebody had a problem they
would call up and say, “This is the problem….Solve it, ” and that’s the last we
heard of ‘em. They didn’t give us any guidelines to speak of or anything else, it
was “take care of this thing.” The Department of Agriculture is entirely different.
They don’t particularly like a bunch of free wheeling people out there. I guess
they kinda like to keep things under control.
Tom: More bureaucratic I guess.
Ed: More bureaucratic. I think it was hard for a lot of the old timers like myself to
accept because we had spent twenty-some odd years basically running our own
show because we knew what we were doing and we knew how to get these things
done, and then all of a sudden we had somebody else breathing down our neck,
and to be candid about it, I saw three or four people running that new Animal
Control Division that I knew back when they worked for the Fish and Wildlife
Service and I knew why they didn’t work for the Fish and Wildlife Service, and
now all of a sudden I see ‘em running the new Division of Animal Control, and
Ladd 15
to be perfectly honest with you I didn’t see much hope for the Division of
Animal Control surviving. It bothered me, so I retired rather than put up with
that bureaucratic nonsense. But, it was a good thirty-some odd years Tom, I
enjoyed it, with the exception of the last year. I really enjoyed every minute of
it. You asked me “if you’d of stayed with the Fish and Wildlife Service,” I
probably would not have retired that early. I would have stayed on.
Side 2 Begins
Tom: So how old where you when you retired?
Ed: Fifty-five.
Tom: Oh, you were?
Ed: Yeah. Two weeks after my fifty-fifth birthday. Wendell Dodge and I took off at
the same time. Wendell and I have been good friends for a long time, forty-some
odd years and we both retired on the same day. He was a Cooperative Wildlife
Research…(unintelligible)…at U. Mass. and I was a station leader at Wildlife
Assistance for Mass., Connecticut and Rhode Island. Like I say, I don’t regret
any of the time. I in hindsight made a very good choice when I didn’t go with
the Corps of Engineers waterfowl lab or the fish lab out in, I think it was
Marion, Illinois or something like that, or any of the states that I could have gone.
I made a good choice.
Tom: I tell you what, you guys have really helped us out. It’s really funny because
when I’ve, you know I’ve ah, I guess this is like the fourth interview I’ve done
now, and they’ve all been Wildlife Assistance guys. The reason is is because I
think you guys were always there to help us out and I think we had a lot of fun
doing it too, which I think was the main thing.
Ed: Well, that’s half the battle right there.
Tom: Yeah. I remember the first time I met you it was at Great Meadows and we
were…
Ed: (Unintelligible)…
Ladd 16
Tom: Yeah. The very first time I think you started telling me about this special
chemical called [DRC-13-39], and the rest is history. But you know, with you
and Pete and…I guess it was just you and Pete that helped us out down there,
but we couldn’t have done it without you.
Ed: Well, Pete I’m sure, feels the same way I do. I know Al Gordon and the rest of
‘em do. Our forte in life was to help other people. I don’t think any of us were
ever looking for any publicity or any glory. In fact, we would have been just as
happy to stay in the background and let somebody else take all the accolades on
this stuff. That just made a lot more sense to us. And, you guys had a problem on
…(unintelligible)…and we had an answer to it because we had been fooling
around with this stuff for, I don’t know, several years and it just made logical
sense that we help you get started, take care of your problem on your refuge, just
like everything else, and I’ll admit we had a lot of fun doing this thing. I know
when the gull work that we did for several years down in around the Chatham
area was all over you had that big old building up at Monomoy, the refuge
headquarters, with the little Coast Guard life boat station, and for several years
in a row we had a going away party celebrating the end of the project where we
ate, pigged out on lobsters, clams and all that good stuff. That was kind of part
of the deal.
Tom: Sure.
Ed: We made a lot of friends during this thing, and all the refuge managers and things
like this, with a lot of state people in various states, waterfowl people of a half a
dozen different states and things like that, and you could rely upon them and I
hope they felt that they could rely upon us too, you know, scratch each other’s
back is what it amounted to.
Tom: You were still around when the coyotes started moving in too. Did you get
involved in coyotes at all?
Ed: No. Oh God, this goes back into the early sixties I guess. Bill Sheldon was at the
Cooperative Wildlife Unit and their so called coy dogs, and we dabbled around
the outside edge of it basically just to learn what was going on and what these
things were and this type of thing, but we were never really involved in this
thing. I got mixed up in a couple of coy dog “coyote” problems in Maine while I
was up there, but there really isn’t anything could have, you know, it’s like rabid
foxes: their there, their gonna expand, their filling a niche, there’s nothing you can
do to stop it, you just have to learn to live with it. It’s still taking place now. It’s
not coyotes now, I guess it’s black bears in Western Mass. Their having a ball
with those things and they just better learn to live with them ‘cause their here,
Ladd 17
including the one that wandered through here the other day.
Tom: Is that right? Well, there’s moose around too.
Ed: Yep.
Tom: The reason I mentioned that is because it’s just funny how thing change over the
years, you know, the different species that people have focused on has changed.
I know Carl Ferguson, he spent a lot of time on coyotes up in Maine. Now, I
don’t think anybody spends time on coyotes. I think everybody’s accepted them,
or bobcats, same thing. Remember Doug Mullins…(unintelligible)…bobcats
used to be public enemy number one.
Ed: He had a pet bobcat up at the University of Maine.
Tom: Yeah. Then bear I guess became public enemy number one, then everybody got
used to those and the coyotes became public enemy number one. I don’t know
what’s public enemy number…cormorants probably.
Ed: Probably. I can remember a couple of coyote calls we got back…
(unintelligible)….Invariably it would be some lady calling up on a Monday
morning, all upset because they heard crunching noise and squealing and yelling
in the back yard, and they’d turn the lights on and they watched a coyote eat the
family cat. There’s no way that you can answer that type of thing. You show a
lot of sympathy and then in a polite way suggest they get another cat and keep it
inside because it’s gonna happen again. Coyotes will walk a mile for a cat; it’s
free food.
Tom: Lately people…it’s funny you mentioned that because lately I’ve read a lot of
things, people have been really encouraging everybody to keep your cat inside
just because of the birds, you know, the number of birds they’re killing. So many
good, well intentioned people can’t accept the fact that birds, or that cats have
such a bad impact on birds.
Ed: Oh I think probably birds are maybe fourth or fifth down on the priority food list
for cats, and it’s happened in the past, it’s gonna continue to happen.
Tom: Millions and millions of birds every year.
Ed: Sure. Sure. We’ve got two cats right next door, Bernie and Buster. One hunts
here across the street and the other hunts down back, and invariably you see ‘em
going across the lawn with their tail up carrying a mouse, but every once in a
Ladd 18
while you’ll see ‘em goin’ across the lawn with a bird, little brown bird in their
mouth. It happens. So, maybe in a sense as far as the bird population is
concerned, the coyotes are doing everybody a favor.
Tom: Yeah, I don’t have any problem with coyotes. I like to hear ‘em at night. I hear
‘em a lot at night over where I am.
Ed: To be honest with you, I’d put a bee hive down back if I thought I could coax a
bear in, but I don’t think my neighbors would be too happy about it.
Tom: I remember one time collecting some gulls for you. You were giving gulls to
General Dynamics. I guess they were…
Ed: Oh yeah.
Tom: …throwing ‘em in the jet engines….
Ed: Stuffing them in the jet engines.
Tom: Yeah.
Ed: General Electric, the [Lynn] plant.
Tom: Oh, General Electric.
Ed: General Electric. [Pratt Whitney] collected their own birds down in Connecticut.
Yeah, that took place for several years. We used to go out and cannon net gulls.
Tried to ship ‘em to the plant out in Ohio, I think. Ship ‘em out alive, and the
same thing with starlings. They used to throw starlings in the jet engines, but
then they get a little weight specific, I mean they wanted a girl, a gull of a
certain body configuration and of a specific weight; very narrow parameters on
the weight, and you just can’t do that.
Tom: No.
Ed: And I think along toward the end of it they got down to the point where, going
through the literature and the books, the only gulls that I could find in the
Continental United States was the California gull, which would fall within the
weight limits they had set, and that kind of ended that. But, we did a lot of
strange things with gulls. Somebody from Denver came out…I guess Pete was
with me on this one, and we went up to a dump some place on the coast and
cannon netted a bunch of gulls and they had a bunch of [jessie] harnesses made
Ladd 19
out of velcro with weights of varying sizes that they put on their backs to
simulate transmitters, and we’d put ‘em on and they’d let ‘em go, and of course
the gulls were groggy and they would just kind of set around. It turned out that a
gull can carry a very, very small, very limited amount of weight. Some of those
gull never did get off the ground again. I had to go catch them and take the darn
straps off and turn ‘em loose. There were some weird things we got involved
with, but like I say, it made thirty-some odd years very, very interesting.
Tom: Oh yeah. That’s what I like about the job is just the variety, even working in the
regional office. There’s still a lot of variety.
Ed: And, there are very, very, very few people in thirty-some odd years that I didn't
enjoy working with. Couple of refuge managers kind of turned me off, but I’m
sure I turned ’em off too. Course a refuge manager is assigned a given piece of
ground. It has four corners to it, and he has to stay within that thing, and a
Wildlife Assistance Biologist was assigned a state or several states, but he didn’t
necessarily have to stay within that state because if the guy next door needed
help, and since there were seven or eight of us in the whole darn region we
would go wherever we had to go to help the guy, and to be perfectly honest
with you, along toward the end of it each one of us did travel authorization (you
get one too). Ours was restricted to the Continental United States and that was it,
I mean if some guy in Nevada needed help, presumably Jim Forbes and I could
go to Nevada to help this guy and nobody would say a word. It just gave us a lot
of freedom and a lot of latitude and we got mixed up in a lot of problems and we
learned an awful lot….(Unintelligible)…thirty-some odd years, much more than
we ever learned in school, and like I said before it was enjoyable until you had to
figure out budget problems, personnel problems, property problems; they were
not much fun, but what the heck, I mean, that’s part of it I guess. But, I also have
to say that when I retired, I’ve enjoyed that too.
Tom: That’s good
Ed: I’ve had a ball most of my life. I spent some time in Europe, compliments of the
United States Army. I enjoyed most of that. Some of it was a little bit grungy,
but what the heck.
Tom: Where were you? Austria?
Tom: Yeah. I spent two years in the Austrian Alps. I’m perched on one mountain top
looking at another mountain top, and the Russians were always looking back at
Ladd 20
me (he chuckles), or they could have been. But, that I think probably is the sum
total of thirty-some odd years of things, of stuff. I went from Predator and
Rodent Control to the Division of Wildlife Services to Wildlife Assistance.
Tom: Why do you think the Wildlife Assistance was transferred to the USDA?
Everybody at the time, I mean, everybody that I knew felt really bad about it not
only because of you guys personally, but because we just felt that there was a real
need for people, like you say, outside of refuges that are dealing with the average
person out there, the average citizen whose got a wildlife problem.
Ed: I think it was political. Wildlife Assistance, well, it’s always been that way.
You’d have an eastern section and a western. Of course the western section was
involved primarily with the livestock industry, and they always felt that the
Fish and Wildlife Service did not appreciate their problems, that only Agriculture
could appreciate their problems, and they tried for years, and years and years to
get back, this thing back into the open, the old Bureau system, where it first
started out, the Division of Entomology I guess. They just kept working on their
Congressmen until they finally got this thing established. Agriculture of course
wanted it because livestock and agriculture, and this would help the livestock
industry. But, I do know for a fact that after this transition took place, there were
a lot of those people out there that pushed for the transfer to Agriculture were not
exactly that happy with what happened and they kinda wished then that they’d
kept their mouths shut and left things well enough alone because it didn’t turn out
quite the way that they figured it was gonna be. They figured that they would
have, basically the free-wheeling operation to do whatever they wanted to do to
protect sheep and cattle and this type of thing and it just didn’t work out that way.
Number one, money was tight. I don’t think any of us east of the Mississippi
River really wanted that transfer. In fact, a lot of us really were deadly against
that thing, and to be honest with you, did what we could do to stop it from
happening because we could see the end of a, of our ability to do what we had
been doing for thirty-odd years, and that’s basically take a problem and solve it
with a minimum of fuss, muss and bureaucracy is what it amounted to. We
could see it coming and it did happen that way. The transfer itself was pure, plain
politics. In fact, most of use were assured that this was not gonna happen, and it
was snuck in, as I understand it, at one of the budget bills and passed at midnight
or something like this, one of these type of deals, and the next thing, you come to
work Monday morning, they say, “Congratulations. Your working for the
Department of Agriculture."
Tom: Well, there’s still that need out there to…the need hasn’t decreased at all.
Ed: No, because…well, in this region right here you’ve got, you’ve got two Wildlife
Ladd 21
unit type of operations left. You have refuges, which is a fixed unit, a fixed
land based unit, and you have Ecological Services (I guess that’s what they’re
called), which is an oversight agency, but you really have nobody to got outside
of the two existing agencies and pull stuff in and work to solve these problems
which were there then and are there now. I guess it was you that called up; you
had a problem on a [Turn] colony down on the Cape or something like that. Well,
"how do you keep foxes from getting to this thing?" I don’t remember what I told
you, but I must have told you something, you didn’t call me back. Either it was a
good answer or a ridiculous answer, but it was on the national seashore down
there. It’s this type of thing.
A refuge to me…you’ve got a fixed piece of ground, you have a fixed
Management plan and you have a mission in life, and this is…when these
extraneous problems come in you really don’t have the time to sit down and
analyze these things and spend a lot of time developing an answer, and this is
where we came in because we had a backlog of information and a backlog of
contacts and this type of thing. We could take a problem and start digging and
squirreling around and find out pretty much everything that had been done on that
problem for the last two hundred years. Bring it in and compile this information
and sort through it, and come up with some kind of an answer. Maybe not the
best answer in the world, but an answer that would maybe solve part of the
problem. This to me was what we could contribute. And, I think probably they
still can contribute to this thing, except that once an agency like Wildlife Services
is separated from the home base, so to speak, the tendency for closer cooperation
is not there. Interior does not really like to go to Agriculture to solve a problem,
nor does Agriculture want to go to Interior to solve a problem.
Tom: Well, the biggest problem that we’ve got with them now is that they, they have to
charge for everything. So, if you’re Joe Homeowner somewhere they have to
charge ‘em for it, and if you’re the Fish and Wildlife Service they have to charge
us for it.
Ed: We did it for nothing.
Tom: Yeah. It was funny because when I was up in Maine, [Godden] asked me to come
down and train somebody on 13-39. Being in the Fish and Wildlife Service I just
got in the car and did my little thing, went back, and then because at that point in
time there was a little bit of controversy over who had the registration, I don’t
know if you remember that….
Ed: No, I’d gotten out of there by then.
Tom: The 13-39 registration had stayed with the USDA, which of course I think was a
Ladd 22
Mistake, but so even though I did the training, when it came time to put the 13-39
out on whatever island it was (I can’t remember), I had to pay [Godden] to come
to do…it was crazy….(Tom laughs about the situation he just described)
Ed: He’s probably still laughing about that. (They both chuckle).
Well, in a sense I can see where [Godden] and a lot of the newer people are being
forced into this thing.
Tom: Oh sure.
Ed: [Godden] wouldn’t have charged you. He would have just let it go, but he had no
choice I’m sure….
Tom: He had no choice.
Ed: He had no choice. This was the Agriculture way of doing business.
Tom: Exactly.
Ed: “We charge you for everything.” If Wildlife Assistance had stayed….Now let’s
face it, there weren’t that many of us. There were what, eight in the region,
something like that?
Tom: Something like that.
Ed: Alright. Just rename it, but keep it in the region to solve the, basically the
problems of the Fish and Wildlife Service, and things like this. It probably would
have been a bigger benefit, and if Agriculture wanted to do the animal damage
control, let ‘em go do it.
Tom: Right.
Ed: And when you stop and look at it, because we realize this perhaps more than
anybody else, Wildlife Assistance, when it separated from Fish and Wildlife
Service actually was two separate divisions, east of the Mississippi River and
west of the Mississippi river.
Tom: That’s right.
Ed: We were never accepted by those people. We didn’t even want to be accept by
those people because we could care less about killing coyotes to save a damn
sheep, pardon my language. That was a dull routine, I mean you do the same
Ladd 23
thing day, after day, after day, after day.
Tom: Right.
Ed: When I first went up and started that office at the University of Maine, one of the
monthly things we had to do was we had to put together a monthly activity sheet.
Thirty days and everyday we would put in what we were gonna do on Monday,
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, four consecutive weeks, and we did
it. We knew full well that on Monday on that sheet we probably would do what
we were suppose to do, but from Tuesday on it was anybody’s guess because you
had no idea what the telephone was gonna bring or what the mail was gonna
bring, and whatever problem. I think it was probably more interesting and more
important that what we had put down on that piece of paper and sent to the
regional office. One of our prime activities in the field was to keep the regional
office in the dark most of the time. (Tom chuckles). It was no fun that way.
I’ve been retired for twelve years. I can tell you this stuff. There isn’t a darn
thing you can do about it anymore. (They both laugh).
Tom: The truth is out there.
Ed: Sure it is.
Tom: I appreciate you taking the time…
Ed: That’s O.K. I enjoyed it. I like to reminisce occasionally, but I don’t go back to
the office and reminisce. Laura Handy is a nice young lady and I like Laura a
lot, but it’s an entirely different organization. I don’t know the people anymore.
I don’t want to know the people anymore. It’s like…(unintelligible)…when I
retired and I walked out the door. Basically what I said was, “ I ain’t a
biologist no mo’,” and I haven’t been. I’ve been doing other things.